Pilcrow

Okay, this is just ridiculous and impossible. Over the past several months, Safari's performance has become worse and worse until it now takes five times longer to do anything than it should. Even now, just trying to type in the post window for LiveJournal, I'm getting repeated beach-ball spinners as Safari lags and tries to keep up with what should be a negligably simple task. It's behaving as though the graphics engine/processor is constantly tied up at 100% capacity. At first the problem seemed to be tied to running Windows in Parallels at the same time, but now it just behaves terribly no matter what I'm doing—I could have Safari as the only program open and still be having this terrible lag and responsiveness. I have no idea what the problem is, doing things such as removing the Flash plug-in and resetting Safari had little if any effect, and I doubt whether wiping my whole system and reinstalling would actually resolve it or not. I do, or did, want to upgrade to OS X Lion, so that would be a good time to do a wipe and clean install. But I wonder whether the problem actually is somehow hardware-related—after all, this laptop is about 4.5 years old now, and did get splashed with hot chocolate earlier this year (not to mention there's probably lots of cat hair stuck inside)—in which case trying to fix it by a software reinstall would be a waste of time. Unfortunately simply replacing it is still not an option, at least not until the car crash settlement is resolved and possibly not even then, depending on how that goes. However, I'm going to have to do something soon, because this is getting to be literally unworkable. I guess tomorrow I'll really have to spend time backing things up so I can give the wipe and reinstall a try.

Meanwhile I'm working on a review of Unwoman's new album Uncovered Volume 1. (Super-short version: I like it, it's good.) It's going slower than expected (and not just because of the terrible computing performance I'm suffering with right now); I'd hoped to have it done this evening, but it became clear I wasn't going to finish before midnight. And I'm pretty tired as I got up at 7 am this morning—about four hours after I usually go to bed and two hours before I usually wake up—in order to attend a meeting at City Hall in support of KEXP's proposed move to Seattle Center. Incidentally, I'm proud of myself for never nodding off during the meeting, and I also managed to resist taking a nap this afternoon, although I didn't really accomplish anything else particularly useful today. In any case, I doubt I'll be staying up much later, so I'll probably finish up the review tomorrow or over the weekend—I should definitely have it done by Monday, in part because I'm expecting to have a lot more paid work to do next week and in part because I don't want to drag it out any longer than that. Oh and I still have to sort through my Bumbershoot photos and get those uploaded; I was intending to start that this evening, but then I thought that, having already listened to Uncovered a couple times, it wasn't going to take long to marshall my thoughts around it. Clearly I'm in danger of over-thinking it. Well, more on that later.

"…you make the best of what's still around."—The Police

I'm out at Caffe Ladro right now. I hadn't planned to be here. After doing my intern work at KEXP this afternoon, staying about an hour late to finish a quick project, I stopped for groceries on the way home, and didn't end up getting back home until almost 9 PM. I was pretty hungry too, so I was going to just stay in and make dinner, although I really didn't feel like it and didn't have a good idea what to do. However, I discovered that my DSL connection was down. Again. It's been acting really flaky in the past few months, sometimes dropping briefly and coming back within a minute, sometimes staying down longer and causing me to power-cycle the DSL router in order to reboot it, which usually seems to work. Tonight I started up my laptop when I got home and tried to check email, only then to discover the connection was down, and rebooting the router didn't bring it back. Coincidentally—at least I believe it's a coincidence—I'm late in paying my DSL bill, which I intended to do this evening. And so I came out to Ladro to get a snack and use the Internet. But my DSL bill remains unpaid, because I forgot to bring my password to log in to the account, and I don't want to reset it. So I'll just have to hope that the DSL is working when I get home, or that it comes back for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I don't know whether to call and complain about the flaky service or not. I've had this DSL router for something like seven years I think, whenever I joined Speakeasy, so it could just be failing on me. But then I've also been unhappy about the terrible upload speeds I have with Speakeasy and I keep wondering whether I should change providers. I just got something recently from Qwest, but I don't know yet whether they actually serve my area, and I'm also irked that their promotional offer doesn't mention what the regular price is. Speakeasy has overall simply worked for me for the past several years, so I'm reluctant to switch.

In other slowly-failing technology, my iPhone has also been a lot flakier in the past few months. After four years, the battery life of course is rather reduced, but still generally good for more than a day; however, it was mostly full when I headed out to the Fremont Solstice Parade, and after a couple hours of having the phone active most of the time and taking photos, it gave me the 20% remaining warning. That would still be manageable for a few months, although I won't be able use the iPhone to cover Decibel Festival (presuming I do get to do that again this year) in that case. However, some of the apps seem to be flakier as well. The iPod app stutters when I'm using other apps, which it didn't used to do, and sometimes crashes. The iPhone may get confused a bit if I'm rapidly switching between the Camera app and the Notes app, as I do at concerts, and hesitates a lot. The Twitter app routinely crashes the first time I start it. Safari will take forever to load Yahoo Mail—although that one may well be Yahoo's fault. Just a bunch of different little annoyances that, combined with the aging battery and the fact that my iPhone won't support any of the newer features, make me feel it's time to upgrade to a new iPhone. But then I'm putting that off as well, partly for the financial hit I'll take in buying one, and partly because I'm pretty sure any new mobile plan will cost more than the one I currently have. 

My MacBook Pro, fortunately, is still chugging along more or less as expected. It does seem to be having more trouble lately with finding and keeping wireless Internet connections, but I can't tell whether it's a problem with the laptop or just with particular locations—Bauhaus has been notably poor on several occasions in the past few months, other places have seemed okay, so maybe it's just Bauhaus. It does annoy me that if I'm running Windows in Parallels, Safari (on the Mac side) gets notably slower, with a lot of spinning cursors as it struggles to load pages, and a tendency to flat-out hang. It seems particularly bad with pages that have Flash-based things like YouTube videos. I'm running the AdBlock extension, and I've been wondering whether that's part of the problem. Aside from the Safari problems, though, everything else seems to be running okay still, which is good. I'd really rather not have to get a new laptop until next year, when hopefully I'll be able to afford it without adding yet another big chunk to my debt, and when I'll also be able to deduct it again from my taxes.

At least I don't have to worry about my car anymore…

Speaking of work, here's a weird work-related problem that's been plaguing me for months.

I work regularly with my friend Tony, who is a Microsoft vendor and has a microsoft.com email address that he uses for work. I use my mac.com/me.com address for work.

When Tony uses the Microsoft Outlook application on his computer to send files to my mac.com address, I receive a single winmail.dat attachment that's apparently an archive of whatever files were included. I get this winmail.dat whether I'm using my Mail application on my laptop or the MobileMe web-based mail interface. However, I can't do anything useful with it, because neither the Mac nor Windows recognizes the .dat file as anything useable. And in any case, I clearly should not be getting this single .dat file when he sends me several separate files that were not archived.

When Tony uses the same Outlook application to send files to my Yahoo address, for example, they come through correctly.

When Tony uses Outlook Web Access to send files to my mac.com address, they come through correctly.

Tony is not having this winmail.dat problem when using the Outlook application to send files to anyone else.

We've just verified that other mac.com users can receive files correctly from him, too. (And Tony sent the test file using both the mac.com and me.com address of our test subject, so it's not a question of that being the issue.)

I'm not receiving winmail.dat attachments from anyone else, including other people using Microsoft email addresses; I haven't actually asked them yet to verify that they're using the Outlook application versus Outlook Web Access, but it seems unlikely that everyone else is always using OWA.

How could there be a problem specifically between Tony's Outlook client—and this is a freshly-installed one on a new machine, but the problem persists—and my mac.com address, but not any other combination?

I ended up overdrawing my checking account for the first time, ever, last month. Four of my checks were cashed the same day, which would've been fine if I'd anticipated that happening and not also bought a few groceries that day. The checks didn't actually bounce, but I did pay a bank fee as a result, and I had to transfer yet more money out of my meager savings account to cover the last couple days of the month.

So, that prompted me to go back to Quicken again, get caught up on adding data to my accounts, and then look over the numbers yet again to see if I'm actually slowly losing money every month, and thus doomed, or if I'm just screwing around and not being careful enough. Annoyingly, the results are inconclusive. It seems that the general trend over the past six months, since buying my condo, has been a slight increase in my funds; certainly the comparison of my total income against total expenses for that time shows a net income. On the other hand, that income does include the insurance money from my car accident, without which I'd definitely be screwed. On yet another hand, I did get a raise in February, so now I'm earning an extra $400 a month (in actual take-home pay) that I wasn't before. But again, if I factor my current monthly salary as my only income and budget expenses based off my averages for the past six months (using fixed amounts instead of averages for the regular bills), it looks like I'm cutting it really close, maybe too close. I have to play with the numbers a bit more, but no matter what, things are going to be tight.

I do have the option of getting a part-time job, either retail (which would be my last resort for a few reasons) or some kind of freelance work (which may be a conflict of interest with my current job). However, I'm still hopeful I can swing another raise at work sooner rather than later - granted, by "sooner" I'm thinking "within six months," not "in a couple weeks." I know it can happen, it's a matter of a few different factors coming together, one important one being more improvement of my own productivity.

Along those lines, I want to make note of two different articles I was pointed to, recently. My sister Andrea (I don't know why I haven't been linking to her site when I mention her) pointed me to "The Courage to Live Consciously", an article by self-help guy Steve Pavlina. It's an interesting article, nothing really new to me, but still a good reminder of the ways in which people (such as me) can be self-defeating and also ways to combat that. And speaking of self-defeating, parkbenchzine posted a link to an article at Cal Poly State U about "Procrastination", which was my major in college (and you all thought it was Literature). This article describes me all too well, and I read it with a big rueful smile on my face. I'd like to think I'm much better about the problems detailed in both these articles than I used to be, and that's probably true, but I know I still struggle mightily with these problems all the time.

Finally, I had been thinking I'd be making a rather mopey post about my finances - well, even mopier than this one may sound - but a surprise today changed my mood for the better. You see, earlier this week Apple Computer announced the open beta testing of Boot Camp, an application that allows you to install Windows XP on the new Intel-based Macs. As a joke, I emailed the partners of the company the Boot Camp description and link, with a subject line "NOW can I get a Mac? :-)" My preference for Macs is well-known, but we really don't do any work that applies to Macs or the Mac OS, so there's no actual reason for us to have Macs in the office.

Today, one of the partners emailed me a thank-you note for taking on the office manager role, and told me to expect a package that would be a "small token of their appreciation" that I "didn't have to share with others". I was expecting a box of cookies. I received a new Intel Core Duo Mac Mini. !!!

I feel I should point out, as a sort of footnote, that yes with money being so tight, arguably a cash bonus would have been better for me. However, the cash would soon be spent one way or another; meanwhile, with my funds being so tight, I'd be faced with a tough choice if my now five-year-old PowerMac G4 were to fail. Now, I have a new Mac that should last me for at least another five years, and I can repurpose my old Mac to be a dedicated file server and media machine, as I've been wanting to do for a couple years now. I'd still like to have a laptop too, but now I won't feel so bad about having to wait another year or two (at least) before that becomes a realistic option.